Texas death row inmate Christopher Wilkins, 48, was executed by lethal injection on Wednesday night after he was convicted of killing two friends in 2008

A death row inmate in Texas has been executed 11 years after he killed two of his friends after one of them mocked him for falling for a fake drug deal.

Christopher Wilkins, 48, died by lethal injection on Wednesday night in what was the first execution of 2017 in the United States.

He was declared dead at 6.29 p.m - 13 minutes after he was given the lethal injection of pentobarbital.

Wilkins mouthed the words 'I'm sorry' to two relatives of one of his victims who were watching through a window before the lethal drug was administered, the Star Telegram reports.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said Wilkins did not give a final statement before he died.

Due to a law put into place in Texas in 2011, Wilkins did not get to choose his final meal - he ate the same thing that was on the menu for everyone else in the prison.

Attorneys for Wilkins had earlier filed an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court asking for his execution to be halted but it was declined on Wednesday.

The decision came three hours before Wilkins was scheduled to be executed.

Wilkins explained to jurors at his capital murder trial in 2008 how and why he killed his friends in Fort Worth three years earlier, saying he didn't care if they sentenced him to death.

'Look, it is no big deal,' Wilkins calmly said from the witness stand.

'I think subconsciously, I've been trying to kill myself or get myself killed since I was probably 12 or 13 years old,' he added, according to NBC News.

His defense team had tried to argue that he had poor legal representation at trial and during earlier appeals and that the courts improperly refused to authorize money for a more thorough investigation of those claims to support other appeals and a clemency petition.

Wilkins was released from prison in 2005 after serving time for a federal gun possession conviction. He drove a stolen truck to Fort Worth, where he befriended Willie Freeman, 40, and Mike Silva, 33.

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Wilkins also testified that the day before the shootings, he shot and killed another man, Gilbert Vallejo, 47, outside a Fort Worth bar in a dispute over a pay phone, and about a week later used a stolen car to try to run down two people because he believed one of them had taken his sunglasses.

'I know they are bad decisions,' Wilkins told jurors of his actions. 'I make them anyway.'

Wes Ball, one of Wilkins' trial lawyers, described him as 'candid to a degree you don't see,' and had hoped his appearance on the witness stand would have made jurors like him.

'It didn't work,' Ball said.

Career criminal: A prosecutor in the case portrayed Wilkins, pictured in his mugshot, as an Old West-style outlaw and a professional criminal who readily resorted to violence

While awaiting trial, authorities discovered he had swallowed a handcuff key and fashioned a knife to be used in an escape attempt.

'This guy is the classic outlaw in the model of Billy the Kid, an Old West-style outlaw,' said Kevin Rousseau, the Tarrant County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Wilkins.

Thirty convicted killers were executed in the US last year, the lowest number since the early 1980s. That tally includes seven executions in Texas - the fewest in the state since 1996.

Wilkins is among nine Texas inmates scheduled to die in the early months of 2017.